The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest. The flood had made, the wind was nearly calm, and being bound down the river, the only thing for it was to come to and wait for the turn of the tide.

The sea‑reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished sprits. A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth . . .

–Beginning of Joseph Conrad's Heart Of Darkness

As we leave one great river bound for another, darker one, are we bound for a journey through Hell? A quest for good and evil?  A grisly and great adventure? Ah, how the primordial depth of Conrad’s themes and the magnificent language he uses to build them will reveal!

In 1890, Joseph Conrad shipped out from Brussels to the Congo, to rescue a Monsieur Klein, ailing agent of a Belgian trading company dealing in ivory. In Heart of Darkness, it is Marlow who ships out from Brussels and sails up the Congo to rescue Mr. Kurtz. Kurtz had come with the noble aim of enlightening the natives. Instead, they envelope him in darkness. As Conrad startles the reader out of complacency, so does Sean Scully with his etchings. Born in Ireland, Scully is one of the world’s most renowned artists. His works are in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art. Here we have Scully’s eight etchings created expressly and exclusively for this edition.

Sean Scully’s etchings are printed on stock from Cartiere Enrico Magnani, in Italy. The book is hand‑bound in Nigerian goatskin. Its hinged and lined box is covered in black Italian cotton.